Tag: water
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On our first trip to Acadia, we didn’t have time to explore one whole section of the park. The Schoodic Peninsula is the only part of Acadia National Park located on mainland Maine. Schoodic is not as developed as Mount Desert Island, but there are some hiking trails and it also has a drive-able loop road. It is not nearly as crowded at Mount Desert Island. If you are looking to get away from the tourists during your time at Acadia, head over to Schoodic.

The Schoodic Peninsula is about an hour drive from the Hull’s Cove Visitor’s Center and is an easy day trip from Mt. Desert Island. To save on gas, you can catch a ferry from Bar Harbor to Winter Harbor on the Schoodic Peninsula and the Island Explorer bus can take you around the Schoodic side as well. We decided to take the drive on a rainy day and that resulted in an even more deserted experience than I was expecting, but made for some interesting photos!

At the end of the Schoodic Loop Road is Schoodic Point (above). Schoodic Point is a great place to watch the surf pound the rocks, but be careful not to get too close to the edge! Big waves can come up seemingly unexpectedly!

If you have the time on your trip to Acadia, I recommend a jaunt to the quietest part of the park. You can really get a feel for natural Maine at Schoodic and get away from the crowds. The Schoodic Woods campground is the newest campground in Acadia and can be easier to get into than the other campgrounds on Mount Desert Island.

A few weeks ago we finalized our plans for our summer vacation. We are taking my mom and grandma and heading back to Maine. This time its not a road trip. We are flying in to New Hampshire and renting a car from there. We are renting a condo in Southwest Harbor on Mount Desert Island for a week.

I am so excited to get back to Maine and to share this wonderful place with my family! We are still far out in the planning stages, of course, and I am hoping that the weather is better than last year. Maine is no fun when it is 95 degrees. As a state, they are not set up to handle that kind of heat, and this is coming from a Michigander. Hopefully it will be cool enough to fully experience the hiking trails and enjoy the outdoors. We are planning on doing a carriage tour of the carriage roads because that was the major thing we missed out on last year that we regretted not doing.

I am looking forward to the smell of salt air and the seeing the rocky Maine coastline. I am excited to drive the Park Loop Road and see the views from Cadillac Mountain. I am excited to spend more time on the quiet side of the island, exploring Southwest Harbor. Summer can come any time now!

Thanks for stopping by! Hopefully, next week I will begin the recap of our cruise and I will have lots of pictures of sunshine and blue waters! Stay tuned for that! If you like my photos be sure to “like” my Facebook Page, follow me on Instagram, and Flickr! You can purchase prints on Etsy and Fine Art America. To see inside my camera bag, check out my Gear Page. For information about our new Guided Photography Tours, visit GuidedPhoto.com.

From the moment I knew we were going to stay at Straits State Park in St. Ignace, and that we would have a campsite right on the water, I knew that I wanted to take a photo of my illuminated tent with the Mackinac Bridge in the background. This post will walk through the process I took to come out with this image.

Planning:I took the photo during late blue hour because I wanted a relatively even exposure between the lights on the bridge and the illuminated tent. I considered using my speedlight in the tent, and that may have yielded a better illumination, but in the end I decided to use a few LED flashlights, as I didn’t want to be obnoxious in the campsite with a flashing tent. I walked around the site to get the best composition, and then set up my tripod.

Shooting:It would be very easy to get all of this (and more) in frame with a lens on the wider end of the spectrum. This was my first instinct; however, my first peek in the viewfinder reminded me of a very real issue: when shooting below approximately 50 mm, background objects appear increasingly smaller as compared to how they are viewed by the human eye. In other words, at 18mm, everything is in frame, but there is a huge tent and a tiny bridge. This is no good.

The solution to this problem is to go telephoto. Above 50mm or so, objects in the background appear larger than they do to the human eye, and the greater the focal length, the closer one will get to a point where background and foreground are nearly identical in perceived size.

The telephoto presents a second issue though, and that is that I could not back up far enough to get everything in frame. We have a technological solution to this though, and a relatively easy one to execute since I was on a tripod. I started on the left and took an exposure, then I panned until I had about 2/3 of the frame as new stuff and I took another exposure. I repeated this process until I had everything covered, with a decent amount on either side in case I had to crop due to my technique not being perfect.

My exposures were at f/11, ISO 400, for 30 seconds.

The Lightroom Editing:The first step was to stitch everything together, which is easily accomplished in Lightroom. Then I cropped, and made simple exposure and contrast adjustments, as well as some color corrections.

The Photoshop Edit:This was the time consuming bit of the edit. I’m just going to list everything that I did.

Using content aware fill, I removed the branding from the tent

Using luminosity masks, I did the following

Corrected some exposure issues in the bridge and water

Brushed noise reduction into the shadows

Using a high pass filter, cloned and emphasized texture in the tent

Using the camera raw filter, I added vignette and other minor finishing touches

So that’s how I got the shot. It’s not perfect, but I think it tells a great story and I learned a lot. I am confident that the next time I am in this kind of situation I can come out with something even better.

Date Taken:
June 26, 2016

Thank you for reading. You can see my best work on 500px and can also find pictures of the “trying my hardest to be good at this” type on Flickr or Pixoto.

I have visited the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore many times. As a child, the “Dune Climb” was something to be done every few years. One time, in my college days, I tricked Ashleigh into doing the entire hike with me all the way to Lake Michigan. “Just one more dune,” I would say, and eventually we made it to the lake. We also one time had the good forture of being able to have a fire between Lake Michigan and the first large dune near the Lake Michigan overlook, which was really special.

About the photo:

This photo was taken from the Empire Bluff Trail, a really great trail just south of Empire, MI, with a picturesque view of the dunes, Platt Lake, and at least one of the Manitou Islands. It was pretty cloudy the day we were there, which allowed for nice, even lighting.

Camera Gear:
Nikon D3100 with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens.

Date Taken:
March 30, 2016

Thank you for reading. You can see my best work on 500px and can also find pictures of the “trying my hardest to be good at this” type on Flickr or Pixoto.

The Empire Bluffs Trail at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is considered a moderate trail and after our hike, I totally see why. The trail has several steep ups and downs that definitely got my heart pounding. We saw a couple of families hiking it and the kids had a lot of fun running up and down them! But, the view at the end made all of that worth it! It was a kind of dreary day, luckily the clouds were interesting enough, but the water was a beautiful teal-blue that I have never seen outside of the Caribbean! Don’t worry, I’ll post a color shot later!

They say cloudy days are good for photography, and overcast does lend itself to more even lighting than you would normally get going out and shooting in the early afternoon. The bad thing about a cloudy day is that dreary skies don’t usually make for good landscapes. A solution? Turn it black and white. It deemphasizes the drab sky and puts the focus on your subject matter.

About this photo:
This was a single RAW exposure with basic edits and B&W conversion done in Lightroom.